Koizumi is still saying that he will play by the rules and step down as Prime Minister in 2006, but there are noises about extending his tenure:

On Sunday, Koizumi reiterated he would step down in September 2006, when his term as LDP president expires, but more and more members of the ruling coalition have floated the idea of possibly extending his term beyond next September.

"That's an important matter we have to think about," LDP Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe said Sunday night about the possible extension.

"The LDP's rule [that Koizumi's term expires next September] is one thing, but on the other hand there's the question of how we should interpret the people's will expressed [in the landslide victory] in this election," said LDP Acting Secretary General Shinzo Abe, who is frequently cited as a possible successor to Koizumi.

New Komeito representative Takenori Kanzaki also hinted his support for extending Koizumi's term. "I'll be speaking about [term extension] on various occasions from now on. Winning this many seats also comes with a certain responsibility for the prime minister," Kanzaki said Sunday.

Yeah, Koizumi has a "certain responsibility," all right. Having finally returned the LDP to complete and utter domination, he's going to have the party leadership anxious to squeeze whatever remaining gains from him it can. It seems to me that, overall, it would be good for him to groom a successor over the next year and leave office as planned. If Koizumi gets through a few more key policy changes and is able to say, next year around this time, "Thank you, Japan, for giving me the opportunity to do my job. It's finished. Time to move on to [say, Abe]," it would help to counter the LDP's image as a party full of people who seek the greatest amount of power they can amass and then keep a death-grip on it well into their dotage.

Speaking of which, people are already starting to say that it's scary that the LDP won so many seats because now it's going to turn into some big, scary juggernaut. Maybe. Let's remember a few things, though: a lot of government power rests in the appointed officials in the federal ministries, and the elected officials know it. And some of the key public employees don't even work for the federal ministries. Recall that one of the toughest parts about getting Japan Post privatization through was the resistance of the postal workers' unions, which threatened not to use their rural outposts to drum up the support of voters for LDP candidates. Koizumi rode into office on a wave of popularity the first time, too; but we all saw soon enough that that wasn't enough for him to get everything he wanted by a long shot.

Hell, the Japan Post privatization package itself has already been watered down considerably; in fact, the watering down started quite a while ago. (Once again, the analogy is not perfect, but check the potential parallels with the California power privatization fiasco.) Koizumi's next project is said to be the integration of the government's two pension systems: the one for civil servants and the one for the rest of us salaried types. Worryingly, he's been quoted as saying, "It will necessary to listen to a variety of opinions while formulating the plan." Sound familiar?

In any case, it is true that the LDP focused hard on Japan Post privatization during the run-up to the election. It's ridiculous, though, to say that that means that voters, in practice, were voting on that single issue and thus can't be said to have expressed support for Koizumi's overall policy platform. Note that, if it's the DPJ we're talking about, its opposition to the LDP's Japan Post scheme was very well-conceived.

No, the Japanese public has not lost its ambivalence toward the SDF deployment in Iraq or the possible amendment of the constitution to allow for combat participation in collective-defense missions. But please. The other parties were all over those issues. They had plenty of opportunities to make their case. Japanese voters, in turn, had the opportunity to, say, vote in a lot of LDP candidates in single-seat districts but "balance" them with more proportional-representation seats from the opposition. They failed to do so. They failed to do so in a big, bad way. They failed to do so even in Tokyo, which is not generally an LDP stronghold. They failed to do so in such a big, bad, Tokyo-included way that it's hard to interpret the election results in any way but that the electorate wants Koizumi and his crew of upstarts to do what they say they're going to do.